Huawei’s Kirin 990 Chipset Have Something That No Snapdragon SoC Can Offer

A YouTube video released today by Huawei entitled Huawei Kirin 990 Warm-up reveals that the chip will be presented at the next IFA show in Berlin on September 6th. Designed by the company’s HiSilicon unit and produced by TSMC using the 7 nm EUV process, the chip will power the Mate 30 line. And Yanmin Wang, regional president of the Huawei Consumer Business Group, told TechRadar that the chip will in folding Huawei Mate X. Initially, the Kirin 980 was to be used in the Mate 20 Pro and P30 series under the hood of the company’s first folding phone.

However, Mate X, originally scheduled to be released during the summer, was delayed twice. The first time launch was promised in September and now it is possible that the device will not start until November. Last month, the head of Huawei’s consumer unit, Richard Yu, was photographed with a redesigned Mate X model with a new camera panel and a hinged cover made of carbon fiber or designed to look like carbon fiber Wang also noted that the Kirin 990 chipset will be used in Huawei’s high-end phones next year, which will probably include the P40 series.

The Kirin 990 video makes specific reference to 5G, the next generation of wireless connectivity. While Huawei designs its own 5G modem chips, by the end of last year it was said that Huawei will integrate a 5G modem chip with Kirin 990. Although ARM Holdings has broken ties with Huawei after its inclusion in the Department’s Entity list of US trade (While a British company, ARM uses American technology in its chip architecture), the licenses obtained prior to the announcement of the ban on May 16 remain valid. Therefore, Kirin 990 must include the Cortex-A77 CPU core and the ARM Mali-G77 GPU. And a Neural Processing Unit (NPU) for artificial intelligence tasks will probably also be included in the Kirin 990 chipset.

What we don’t know right now is whether the 5G modem integrated into the Kirin 990 SoC will support 5W ultra-high band wave mmWave networks and 5G sub-6GHz networks. Most 5G networks in the country use the latter. The low band spectrum travels farther and penetrates buildings better than high-frequency waves. However, the mmWave frequency spectrum has a higher capacity and offers higher speeds.